Personal Development

JOHN PETROZZI: Hi and welcome to Living is Easy. I’m John Petrozzi. Thanks for joining us today.

Well, today we’ve got another very special guest on the show, and he’s Dale Beaumont. You may have read his books; he’s got a whole lot of books called “Secrets Exposed.” And I’m really happy to have him on the show today because we’re going to talk all about his program, which is called “Profile Accelerator.” I think it’s all about, basically, accelerating your profile online and your imagery out there.

Hi, Dale, and thanks for coming on the show.

DALE BEAUMONT: Absolute pleasure. Looking forward to chatting.

JOHN PETROZZI: Yeah. So, you know, someone’s personal image is a really valuable thing. If someone has a great image, they tend to be able to get out there a lot more, and if they’ve got a poor image, because they’ve been sort of rat-bagged or dirtied on the media, their image and also their income potential start to reduce, too. So how do we improve our image?

DALE BEAUMONT: Well, there’s a lot of things we can do to improve our image. So what I’d like to do is discuss all of those, but before we do that, just to really emphasize the importance of building a profile—other people call it your ‘credibility’, your ‘brand’, your ‘awareness’ in the marketplace, some even people call it your ‘reputation’—it’s one of the most important assets that you have. I’d like to think of it like as a filter, and through the filter, people make decisions about whether they’re going to work with you or not just based on who you actually are, how you present yourself, on how your profile is represented in the marketplace.

It’s also like what you just said earlier, it determines how much people actually pay you to do the work that you do. So if you’ve got a bigger profile, then, naturally, you’ll make more money. One example of that is, recently, I believe, Donald Trump was paid $1.3M for a forty-five minute presentation.

JOHN PETROZZI: Oh, wow!

DALE BEAUMONT: And I can tell you, it wasn’t great because of his content, you know, if you would have sat in that seminar, you would have been very disappointed because you would have learned things like, you need to set goals, you need to take responsibility for your life, you have to surround yourself with a great team-

JOHN PETROZZI: I see.

DALE BEAUMONT: These things that you can teach a 12-year-old to get up and to say. So you see, he wasn’t paid because of his incredible content, he was paid because of who he is and his reputation and brand in the marketplace. And so I really believe that all of us need to start thinking of ourselves as a brand and understanding that people are actually brands, too.

Every single one of us sends messages into the marketplace every single day, but oftentimes they’re not really controlled messages, they’re just what kind of happen by default. And unfortunately, there’s a lot of kind of negative stuff that gets put out there, and so I help individuals and businesses to kind of craft their brand so they can get more attraction in the marketplace, do the marketing term, or just to be more heard, to influence more people, and to make a greater impact.

JOHN PETROZZI: It’s very similar to Richard Branson’s message, isn’t it? Because he’s got a very large brand version and he’s taking that to many different markets, whether it’s on finance or airplane or fitness, a whole lot of places, or music.

DALE BEAUMONT: Absolutely. And once you do, once your brand starts to reach a certain size in scale, there’ll be a lot of people that will want to, you know, tap into that because there’s a lot of people that are looking for a kind of in-built platform. You can see examples of these all the time. I just saw, a couple of days ago on television, that now Beyoncé has her own fragrance, and you know why, because she has a profile now that there are other companies that are approaching her an opportunity.

Once your profile is at a certain size, you don’t have to go out there and chase opportunities all the time. Opportunities start coming to you because people want to be associated with brands that have recognition in the marketplace. And so it’s kind of, sometimes a difficult thing to create, but once you’ve got it, it becomes such a huge asset and opportunities are drawn to you and you can start charging more money.

JOHN PETROZZI: Yeah. So are we sort of stuck with the old media of newspaper and print, and radio, television or will we have to use the internet?

DALE BEAUMONT: Absolutely. That’s a really exciting thing. The whole world has changed in the last few years especially with regards to media. In the past, media—they’d be outlets that controlled mass distribution were controlled by just a handful of people. Your people like Rupert Murdoch, you know, those type of people that have these publications or networks, and the only way that you could ever get mass appeal, is through those channels. But now, anybody, through the value of the internet that’s going from being in the hands of the few to being in the hands of many, in fact, being in the hand of everybody, we all have now equal opportunity to get ourselves out there.

The internet of course is the best way to do that. The stars, or the stars that are about to be discovered, that’s the channel that they’re using. There’s some great example, is a guy called Gary Vaynerchuk. You can check out his website, winelibrarytv.com. He grew his business from $5M-a year in turnover to $65M-a year in turnover.

JOHN PETROZZI: That’s ridiculous.

DALE BEAUMONT: -through the power of having videos online where he was educating people about wine.

JOHN PETROZZI: Wow.

DALE BEAUMONT: Another lady called Lauren Luke, she started off as a receptionist and then started producing videos about makeup. Now her videos are being seen hundreds of millions of times, and she now has her own makeup range called “By Lauren Luke.” That’s where a cosmetic company approached her and said, “Because you’ve got such a following now, and you’ve got such a fan base and your profile’s so big, we want you to actually be the face of our new brand.” And I believe both of them have done a six-figure book publishing deals, as well.

JOHN PETROZZI: It’s just amazing.

DALE BEAUMONT: So it’s exactly why every person now has the opportunity to build their brand. Internet is one of the best ways to do that. So I really believe that everybody needs to start being conscious of their online reputation. And it’s not just about having a website, website is part of that, but I really recommend that people should set up a series of what I call “web-based properties.” So getting involved in YouTube, getting involved in Flickr, being able to store content in multiple different locations is really important. And so, yeah, online is great, and there’s a bunch of other strategies as well, but I’ll stop talking now and let you ask the next question.

JOHN PETROZZI: Well, yeah. I have a question just in terms of once you got an image on the web, as a matter of protection, how can you stop someone from sort of, I don’t know, badmouthing your particular product or service?

DALE BEAUMONT: Sure. Well, they say-

JOHN PETROZZI: Particularly a competitor.

DALE BEAUMONT: I’m sorry?

JOHN PETROZZI: Particularly a competitor.

DALE BEAUMONT: Absolutely. Well, there’s a service I think everyone should subscribe to. It’s called “Google Alerts” and you just go to google.com/alerts. If you have a Google account, which most people do have—they’ve got either a Gmail account or maybe a YouTube account—you can easily just plug that in and then what you do is you program into it keywords. I got my personal names on, you know, “Dale Beaumont!” (in exclamation marks), and I’ve also got other keywords about names of my business or “Secrets Exposed” series or “Secrets Exposed” books, and I put all the keywords relating to my name and my company and brand.

And then anytime something is published on the web that includes those particular words, I get sent an email and they’re all listed, one underneath the other. And so sometimes there are people that are saying wonderful things about me, I didn’t even know, and I could have just completely gone under the radar. But now that these alerts come through, I can go in and just thank the person and say, “Thanks. I’ve really appreciate that feedback.” And people get such a shock when you actually take the time to notice and to say “thanks” but it wasn’t you scanning the web, it was Google doing it for you-

JOHN PETROZZI: Yeah.

DALE BEAUMONT: -and bringing in that information. And likewise as well, if someone says something negative, you can quickly go in and rectify the situation.

JOHN PETROZZI: Yeah. Wow. Dale, in your experience of helping people and coaching people through developing and building their personal image on the web, have you noticed people tend to sort of, I suppose, overestimate their value, or sort of fake it a little bit?

DALE BEAUMONT: Certainly, yeah. There are people that actually try to be something that they’re not. And one of the things that I’ve certainly learn, especially from those two examples that I’ve mentioned earlier, one was Gary Vaynerchuk from Wine Library TV and also Lauren Luke. Both of those have proved that you can’t really hide, you can’t really fake it, you can’t be someone other than yourself.

And it’s really, in this day and age now, it’s about just really being genuine because people can sort of, they can kind of sniff a fake from a mile off. So this is whereby, again before, you used to have other people say what beauty was, and other people, you know, look at the case of Marilyn Monroe, you know, she has to wear her hair like this and she has to dress like this and she has to run on treadmill, all that stuff to be beautiful. But now, people are realizing that if you have a look at Lauren Luke, she’s not a model-looking type of girl, she’s just a natural everyday woman but people love her because she’s just herself. She’s not trying to be anybody other than just who she is. And I think people that do try to take on an online persona that’s kind of different will eventually become on stock and they will end up ruining their brand-

JOHN PETROZZI: Yeah.

DALE BEAUMONT: -and could ruin their credibility.

JOHN PETROZZI: I could imagine. Yeah. So in terms of getting some momentum, on the web for developing a personal image, do you have to start up with some sort of hype or some sort of extravaganza? Or kind of just start off with a small website that you develop over time?

DALE BEAUMONT: Yeah. I think it’s about creating your home base, which is a website, but then it’s about getting involved in various kind of online communities, and so some of the ones that I recommend would be Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, and maybe Friend Seeder, and then just get involved in these communities. But you don’t have to kind of manage all of them at the same time. There are various tools out there where you could syndicate your content. So if you put something on your website, it automatically goes into Facebook, which automatically then goes onto YouTube. So it’s not as hard as what some people may think.

So, yeah, starting with your own website and then it’s about creating useful, good content. You know, there’s that saying, “If you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all.”

JOHN PETROZZI: Yeah.

DALE BEAUMONT: And so, it’s a bit like that. The fact that people now, people’s lives are in just more kind of clutter, people want to hear good quality information. So if you can start thinking about “What are the topics that you’re interested in? What are the things that you like?” there’d be other people out there that would be interested in those same things, and just by sharing knowledge, by sharing information, and providing stuff with short, sharp, useful tips in different topic areas, people start to follow you and they’ll want more.

JOHN PETROZZI: Okay. And in your experience—we found that it’s mainly texts that people read or they listen to audio or they watch videos—how do they share their content?

DALE BEAUMONT: Well, it’s, I really believe that you need to have content in different, different mediums. So I have print content in text, I have audio, I have video, and I also have webinars online. I’ve just even launched an online magazine as well. So I’m not precious about this particular style, as long as my content is getting out there, I just want to make sure it hits as many people as I can. What I normally do is use some of the content that’s in the audio or from a video, and then I put it into audio form as well.

I kind of mix and match a little bit, but I think it’s important to have a mix because some people like to read, some people like to listen, some people like to watch, and some people like to engage with you and have more of a dialogue and a conversation. The mistake that people make is they go, “No, I’m only going to write, I’m never going to do videos.” It’s not as hard as what you think.

One of the things that I’ve featured of course is, you know, how easy it is and how accessible it is for people who are writing video content, because now, video content is very hot property on the web, that people are demanding more and more video content because of increase speeds in internet and now people can access that content much easier, so video content is really easy to produce.

When I do videos, what I like to do is suck out the audio. So now after one video, I’ve now got a video, I’ve now got an audio, but then I send the audio to somebody who turns it into an article. So now I have three pieces of content from five minutes worth of my time.

JOHN PETROZZI: Wow.

DALE BEAUMONT: So that’s one of the things that I recommend more people should be doing. It’s producing video content because it can, you can suck out the video and present it in so many different ways.

JOHN PETROZZI: Now that’s just amazing. Dale, let’s go to a break and when we come back I just want to talk to you a bit about your “Secrets Exposed” series because it’s massive; I think it’s about 25 books that you wrote, was it?

DALE BEAUMONT: It’s actually 16.

JOHN PETROZZI: Sixteen. Sorry. Sixteen books. That’s an amazing number and I think you did that in quite a short period of time?

DALE BEAUMONT: Yeah, we did it in a span of about three years.

JOHN PETROZZI: Yeah.

DALE BEAUMONT: We did eleven of those in one year.

JOHN PETROZZI: Wow.

DALE BEAUMONT: So we’ve got pretty a crazy ride.

JOHN PETROZZI: Alright. Well let’s go to a break and when we’ll come back and talk about your experience in writing those books.

DALE BEAUMONT: Thank you.

[Break]

JOHN PETROZZI: Hi and welcome back to Living is Easy. We got Dale Beaumont on the line today.

And Dale, before the break, we spoke about your “Secrets Exposed” books. Can you tell us about the experience of writing so many books and what you’ve learned out of interviewing all those people?

DALE BEAUMONT: Wow! The experience was pretty amazing. We did, yeah, as I said, published, 16 books in the space of about three years. Through that, I had the opportunity to work with about 214 of the country’s most successful people in a range of different topic areas. So for people that aren’t familiar with the series, there are interview star books in different topic areas. So for example, I have “Secrets of Male Entrepreneurs Exposed,” “Secrets of Female Entrepreneurs,” “Secrets of Property Millionaires,” “Small Business Owners,” “Great Public Speakers,” “Inspiring Leaders,” etcetera, etcetera.

So we pick a different topic, we find 14 or 15 experts in that particular area, do in-depth interviews, and then get all those interviews into text format, reword them and present them in a book. It’s really an amazing resource for people to learn the experience of 14 or 15 people in a particular topic area and access that knowledge just in a few days of reading.

JOHN PETROZZI: Who are some of the stand-out people that you spoke to?

DALE BEAUMONT: A whole bunch of people. This guy called John Fitzgerald, who’s a very successful property developer, his business does about a hundred million dollars a year in turnover. But what inspires me so much about what John Fitzgerald has done is that in the balance that he has in his lifestyle, he’s phenomenal. He spends a lot of time with his family, a lot of time with his kids, he travels extensively, and he spends time on his sort of spiritual side of his life. So really, it’s not just great to see how successful he’s been financially but how he’s really made a focus to keep balance in other areas of his life as well.

JOHN PETROZZI: Yeah.

DALE BEAUMONT: And also in the area of community, he now runs a series of schools in Queensland and in the New South Wales now for kids that have been kicked out of school and are no longer accepted by the mainstream education system. So he sets up these schools to work with kids that basically have nowhere else to go in order to help them to get an education. So that cost him millions of dollars every year to fund, but he does it out of his own pocket because he believed that there’s huge need and wants to give back. So he’s just one example.

In the business side, there’s Christina Carlson from a company called [0:20:02] and has a very inspiring story, and another guy called Jeremy Lim. There’s too many to mention.

JOHN PETROZZI: Yeah. It’s okay.

DALE BEAUMONT: Numerous stories.

JOHN PETROZZI: Dale, in terms of work-life balance, how do some of these people actually balance their quite, I suppose, busy careers and everything else in their life?

DALE BEAUMONT: Well, I think what it’s really about is at the beginning, you know, you do need to put in some hard yards. There are some people out there that just think that business is just, you know, can start and end with very little time and very little money. It does take work at the beginning but it’s about priorities, it’s about planning, it’s about scheduling, and then it’s about getting your business profitable enough that you can start to hire really good staff. And it’s learning about how to become a better leader.

JOHN PETROZZI: Yeah.

DALE BEAUMONT: And it’s also learning about how to document and systematize your processes in your business and so you could then delegate those tasks to other people. And then if those people ever move on, because they’re being documented, you don’t have a case of kind of Chinese whispers with constantly your staff getting [0:21:07]. They can always go back and look at those systems and watch those resources and training videos that you prepared and know where to pick off where the other person left off.

JOHN PETROZZI: Okay.

DALE BEAUMONT: So these are just a few.

JOHN PETROZZI: Yeah. Being organized is one of the key ones.

Dale, where do you think the internet is going to go in terms of, I suppose, advertising of the next five to ten years?

DALE BEAUMONT: Well, people are moving more away from their television sets and getting more online, and moving away from magazines. Sales have dropped by, I believe, up to 17% in the last three years, and so magazines are really struggling, and even books as well. There’s going to be a lot more people that are going to be reading their books that are already out on their iPhone but a lot of people will be reading them on their iPad and other sort of tablet style devices.

So what that really means is that advertisers will be moving online, and what’s exciting is that advertisers are going to be looking for people that have a following. They’re going to be looking—there’s a saying in marketing, “Eyeballs lead to cash”—so if you got eyeballs, if you got people that are reading your website, if you got people that are engaged in you, then you can now attract the advertising dollars that used to go into television and radio and those other places.

So if you create a following, there’s a great opportunity now that there’s a guy in America who is a business guy and he produces audio content. And he now has ads in his audio content that he’s creating, one at the beginning, one in half time and one at the end, and so they’re paid advertisements. So yeah, if you’re someone that’s a content creator, and you’ve got a following, then it’s going to be an exciting opportunity for you to monetize that in the future and to get a share of that trillion-dollar advertising revenue.

JOHN PETROZZI: That’s interesting, isn’t it?

DALE BEAUMONT: Yeah.

JOHN PETROZZI: We’re almost out of time, Dale, but what’s in store for you over the next little while? What’s in store for you?

DALE BEAUMONT: In store for me? Well, I’m working on two new programs, one is the “Profile Accelerator Program” which is to help companies and individuals to build their profile both online and offline. It’s about eight core strategies that we teach, and it’s really about people becoming more well-known, and for businesses to be able to dominate their industry. That’s a profitable program, love running it to get great a feedback.

And there’s also another program that I’m running, called “Business Blueprint” and that is to help entrepreneurs and business owners to be able to go to that next level. Because of my relationships that I’ve built with the “Secrets Exposed” series, at the Business Blueprint conferences, we bring in some of the best entrepreneurs and speakers in the country to share their secrets of how they’ve achieved what they’ve done. So that’s a great project for anyone that’s growing their business to be involved in it, because a lot of them having to do things with [0:23:56]. I give you access to people that have been there and done it and you can follow their steps.

JOHN PETROZZI: Oh, that’s great, Dale. Becoming almost like a bit of one-stop shop for information?

DALE BEAUMONT: Yeah.

JOHN PETROZZI: That’s great!

DALE BEAUMONT: Yeah.

JOHN PETROZZI: All right, that’s all we have time for. Thanks again for coming on the show. I really appreciate it.

DALE BEAUMONT: Thank you.

JOHN PETROZZI: And thanks for joining us today on Living is Easy. To listen to this and other podcasts, go to www.livingiseasy.com.au.

I’m John Petrozzi. Until next time, stay well and stay happy.

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